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cape, like he was a vampire. As we got a little older, Frank started to carry a sawed-off shotgun under his cape, so it came in handy.
    Another Outcast was Rocco Ciofani. ‡ Rocco was a tough, tough kid. His father was a straight Italian guy, a working man, who had an auto-body shop. I ran away from the boys’ home and slept in hisshop until Mr. Ciofani threw me out. He knew we were no good. Rocco was a shorter guy. He was a trained boxer, and he was crazy with a shotgun.
    Not everyone in the Outcasts was Italian. Bernie Levine * was a fat, spoiled Jewish kid who lived near my stepfather’s house. All the Outcasts hung out in Bernie’s basement because he got all the drugs—weed, speed, heroin. It’s at his house that a bunch of Outcasts started shooting heroin. I took lots of drugs, but I never got hooked on injecting them.
    Bernie became very important later in my life. In the early 1970s, he moved to San Francisco and ran a recording studio for bands like the Grateful Dead. I was living in Miami by then, and Bernie got me started supplying his bands in San Francisco with cocaine. That’s how I first got big in the coke business. It started with an Outcast. These guys stayed with me through my whole life.
    Jack Buccino, the kid who drove me to see my mother in the hospital before she died, was another Outcast. I stayed at his house after Mr. Ciofani kicked me out of the auto-body shop. What a weird family. Jack’s mother was a half-baked lounge singer. His father sold fake aluminum siding. He believed he was really good-looking and dressed like he was Dick Clark on American Bandstand .
    From his parents’ stupid influence, Jack fancied himself an actor and a singer. That was his goal in life. Mrs. Buccino was a typical Italian mother who babied the fuck out of him and let him live in a fantasy world. Jack sang in bands and talked about being in the movies, but mostly he was a junkie thief who never moved out of his parents’ house.
    When I was in middle school, all the Outcasts were high school age or older. They thought I was amusing because I would fight anyone. I still went to school sometimes, and the Outcasts would come by and look for kids for me to fight. They’d stand by the playground and point at a big kid and say, “Go fucking slap him and tell him to meet you by the dugout.”
    That was the spot for fighting. I’d fight the kid, and if I started to lose, the Outcasts would all jump in and beat his ass.
    There was a black kid at my school who had two first names—Herbert Peter. * He was a real wacko, a bad kid like me. He had been held back a few grades, and his muscles were overdeveloped. To be king of the school, I decided to fight him. Even the Outcasts thought I might be overreaching, and they were right.
    Herbert Peter gave me the fight of my life. He knocked me down, stomped me. He beat the stuffing out of me. The Outcasts didn’t stop that one. They stood back laughing their balls off.
    A FTER I got my ass kicked, the Outcasts taught me how to really fight. The biggest Outcast was Dominic Fiore, † who was over six feet tall. He became my teacher. We’d hang out in his basement. We’d push all the furniture to the side, and he and the other Outcasts would beat the shit out of me.
    Dominic’s belief was: to give a beating, you got to learn to take a beating. I’d already been beaten by Herbert Peter. But Dominic believed I needed more. You learn to take pain so it doesn’t make you curl up or run. Dominic and the other Outcasts beat me with their hands, with pool cues, belts, chair legs. Then they taught me how to use those tools properly.
    I’d seen my father give hundreds of beatings with a baseball bat, but Dominic taught me how to really use one. There is an art to everything. You think you just grab a bat and start swinging? It doesn’t work like that, bro. I mean, give a normal person a bat and give me a bat, and we’ll see who does what.
    You don’t swing for the fences when